The Harsh Reality
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
The human mind is a work of wonder. It’s clever at times, foolish at times. It protects itself by “procrastinating” impending pain to the last moment possible.
That moment has come, the mind is overloaded, and senses pour in. The mind faces reality, the harsh, cold reality.
Bleeding, hemorrhaging. Silent screams of pain, invisible gore. Cold, in an unexplainable manner. Ears numb and ringing from extended exposure to loud music. Life takes a rapid turn.
Nobody knows.. nobody cares..
Reality dawns upon the mind, the harsh, cold reality..
Sushi and Pirates
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
No, pirates don’t eat sushi. Just a super short way for me to say I had sushi and then watched Pirates of the Caribbean. Was terribly bored on Sunday, and my mind was set on going out to lepak somewhere, somehow.
Yeah, didn’t turn on the lights in my room in the morning, so that’s pretty much how it looked like..
Xiu Yin wanted to go pick up a TVfXQ CD she ordered (she just loves to splash out on original CDs) at Sungai Wang. As my bud was itching to go out, I agreed and figured that we’d just go catch Pirates of the Carribean at Times Square.
But before that, the guys came over for a short discussion on our project.
Sorry guys, my mind was blocked as my heart was already waiting for the bus out there… Read the rest of this entry »
Dev Reboot
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal, Technical
Chu Hang was right: you can’t just dive into development without proper planning. Thinking that I’ve “got it” with the whole interpreter thingy, I jumped into development. The initial parts was easy enough, creating a lexer, which is able to recognize strings, identifiers, numbers, operators from user input (in the form of text). The lexer recognizes these and splits user input (codes) into tokens.
But then, things turned ugly. Making sense of these tokens turned out to be much, much more difficult. There was just so many possible input forms that parsing the tokens was terribly complicated. It was like looking up Mount Everest, and all I had was slippers.
Then my bro sent me a link of an expression “evaluater” written in C#. It also turned out that the evaluater extends on source code generated by a software called ANTLR.
I thought of using a similar approach, using ANTLR to quickly generate the lexer and parser components. All I had to do is to define the grammar rules. But you see, I hardly understand the article (the one explaining the expression evaluater). I realized, I need to do more reading.
Incidentally, the ANTLR site had a link to a “Programming Languages” course. Well, since my seminar topic is gonna be something on this, so no harm reading. For all you know, I can do something much more deeper, like garbage collection techniques, memory allocation techniques etc.
But then of course, I also need to allocate some time to read Langfords’ Beginning Photography, which is a pretty damn good book I’d say, with plenty of photos as samples. After all, how else to learn photography without photos??
Reading up on theory can be boring. Wish me luck!!
Sony DSC V3
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
I don’t know where this itch came from - too bored with my day job, or too stressed with job + final year project, but all out of the blue, I remembered that Stephen Tang has a camera that he wants to sell off. So I asked him about it.. as you would know, 2nd hand goods can be so damn attractive at times..
It just took me an evening to make up my mind - I’ll buy it!! RM 1150 for the Sony DSC V3 that comes with a whole bunch of manual settings, and Stephen even includes a nice bag and 2 filters (Polaroid and UV filter, not in picture).
The DSC V3 is much larger in real life, especially if you’re used to using tiny point-and-shoot cameras. It has a 2.5″ lcd screen on the back, and I realized what a luxury it is when I used my old Nikon 4100 to snap the picture of the DSC V3. Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry Opera
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
As much as I love you, I can’t continue to use you. You come bundled with all the neat things that I would possibly need so that I don’t need to go find accessories to make you work better. I don’t need to worry about any ill conceived accessory that make you unstable and overly fat.
My dear Opera, you fetch news that I like from around the Internet quickly and discretely for me, and you make it so easy and even pleasurable for me to browse news items. Best of all, I can always leave you when I feel like it. I can always go back to you, and you let me continue where I left off. More importantly, you’re just so, damn slim and sexy. You’re so light I can always multitask, doing other things while I’m still working with you.
I’ve always loved you. It’s been nearly 2 years. For 2 years, you’ve stuck by me through changing environments.
Sadly, there’s this new friend of mine, Ms Wireless Mouse 5000. Why must you refuse to work with her? She’s quite nice once you get to know her y’know. Every time when she’s around, you’d just bounce up and down so impatiently, I can hardly work with you nor read my favorite news. I can’t search for the latest music and movies to download. You see, using you became such a pain. I’m so sorry I have to use such words on you dear..
I’m afraid I’m left with no choice but to replace you. But worry not! Internet Explorer the 7th is definitely a few classes below you. I know you hate her even more, the only other alternative is Firefox. Sure I miss nice perks like “speed dials”, but you’ve got to understand, the way you twitch when Ms Wireless Mouse 5000 is working with you is just unbearable.
Sorry to break the news to you, but some lads have created not a mind bogglingly great extension to Firefox that makes it so much easier for me to design websites and debug JavaScript. Though Firefox isn’t as slim as you are, but some guy managed to make Firefox portable! Since I can’t install programs at my office, I can’t bring you to work. So sad to say, I work with Firefox, even at the office.
Sorry Opera, I miss you.. I promise to return to you when you’ve calmed down and decide to work with Ms Wireless Mouse 5000. Until then, take care!
